TURANDOT

Students: Valerie Mauerhofer & Ömer Gürel

The story behind the Opera Turandot carries a long and layered origin story that goes far beyond its well known «Chinese« association. Originating from Persian folklore, transforming through Turkish and German reinterpretations, to its most famous version of an Italian libretto.

Turandot ‘s world was constructed – an imagined geography, a fantasy of the exotic.

The stage-set moves through a series four environments. Travelling from Puccini ‘s imagined East to the tale ‘s roots up to its echoes into modern day society. Each scene becomes a recontextualization – a shifting landscape that questions the gaze of aesthetics rather than reproduces it.

These four environments are:

Puccini ‘s imagined East

A modern-day metro

An ancient-roman excavation site

A courtyard inside a Viennese „Gründerzeit“-building

These shifting environments manifest themselves on stage through frames on wheels acting as digital portals.The theatre space follows a circular layout with the stage nested in the centre, enclosed two rings one for the audience and one accommodating the orchestra. The audience gets offered an informal seating arrangement with oversized pillows to encourage a dynamic experience and movement around the stage.

The audience remains excluded from full immersion into these worlds and are limited to the view of the frames – a hidden world – The physical stage is composed of three large scale abstracted objects re-created from worldly assets: A gateway, a column and a stair/chair hybrid. These objects are anchor points where all these digital worlds overlap.

The actors on the other side perform wearing XR glasses – fully immersed in the reimagined worlds.The physical audience witnesses the actors wearing VR headsets and interacting with these three physical objects on stage. The portals on wheels offer glimpses into the digital worlds and become a storytelling tool.

Two contrasting experiences becomes a statement in itself: these worlds are not real, but reconstructions shaped by imagination and appropriation. – inviting the audience to revisit the performance from both sides, and to reflect on the boundaries between presence, perception, and imagination.